Friday, March 31, 2017

Unknown Armies, Dark Shadows Edition

Back in the winter, I introduced Nicole to classic Dark Shadows. We only watched a couple of plotlines — some day, when we have more time, we'll watch the whole thing, but that's probably a year's undertaking — but we hit a lot of the classic plots. (Ultimately, we focused on the plots that ended up being revisited in House of Dark Shadows and the 1991 revival.) If you're unfamiliar, it's a very melodramatic soap opera from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The basic structure was to rip off Gothic novels — the starting plots are pretty unabashedly taken from Jane Eyre and The Count of Monte Cristo — but after a few episodes and flagging ratings, they pretty quickly added supernatural elements. Josette's ghost is the first weird thing to appear, but they pretty soon include phoenixes, vampires, werewolves, patchwork men, sorcerers, time travel (lots of time travel), and Lovecraftian horrors.

At any rate, coupled with Unknown Armies, third edition, being in my headspace, I drafted a character creation chart for the first 200-ish episodes. The four Collins family members and their governess — Carolyn Stoddard, David Collins, Elizabeth Collins-Stoddard, Roger Collins, and Victoria Winters — are meant to be the player characters, although no stats are provided. (At some point, I should probably fix that.) Their starting relationships are included, however, although their relationships to the "cabal" have been left blank. Their various other contacts, as well as some artifacts and the manor house itself, are included.

2 comments:

She had an academic acquaintance with it, but had never seen an episode. Since I might have gotten the complete series box set when it dropped a couple of years ago, this clearly needed to be remedied.